What I did this summer: I bought a house, killed my dog, and my computer magically turned into a brick

And, in addition to all that, I’ve been working to shrink my digital life.

We’re buying a house! Yay? It’s exciting and nerve-wracking, and all happening faster than I expected. We already own a house, but we never really liked it. So, a few years ago we decided to start saving for an upgrade. Our target date was 2020, but after meeting with a financial adviser (because now that I’m fifty-something I do responsible adult shit like that) we determined there was a way to move forward this year.

We sat down with people at the bank in May and on the long July 4 weekend we started to look for a new home.

We found a house that weekend!

But then learned someone had already bid on it, and the buyer only looked at bids in the order in which they came.

The next weekend we euthanized Abby the dog. Abby had degenerative myelopathy for about a year and a half before she died. On Tuesday she had some sort of fit, which the vet (based only on our description) guessed might have been a spinal infarction. Regardless, after that night her ability to move her hind legs diminished greatly. She walked like the drunkest of drunks. She had already been pooping inside the house (because she was losing control of her bowels due to the myelopathy) for the last couple of months. But, the key indicator that it was time, was that she stopped eating. Even her special crazy expensive delicious food that she gobbled down even at her most anxious and picky. By Friday we determined that the time had come. We’d been expecting this moment, but it was still a really sad weekend.

Let me back up for a second.

The first week of June we went to the beach for a week. It was awesome. When I came back and fired up my computer nothing happened. It was dead. Bricked. There wasn’t much on it. Lots of pretty pictures I saved off the internet for my screen saver. Old tax returns (which I also have in paper). And, oh yeah, the novel work in progress. Fortunately, I’m pretty good about backing stuff up, so I have the novel. What I didn’t have were the latest round of edits (which was about 40 pages worth). So I had to find a new strategy for editing the novel.

Then my dog died.

Then we found a house. A different one. One that we made an offer and it was accepted. One that we expect to own on Aug. 31.

And, somehow, in the midst of all this, I lost interest in my WIP. I didn’t stop working on it. Not completely. I began editing sections again. But it became a depressing chore instead of an engaging interest.

Wipe: A Brief History of Toilet Hygiene

INTRO

“What am I looking for in this passionate searching through articles? I am looking for a viewpoint that will make a different world around me when I look up and out the window, a different universe, the same great change I saw when I first started reading science fiction.” – Katherine MacLean

Kant likened the worst of humanity to the Abderites, hence Abderitic –

“Bustling folly is the character of our species: people hastily set off on the path of the good, but do not persevere steadfastly upon it; indeed, in order to avoid being bound to a single goal, even if only for the sake of variety they reverse the plan of progress, build in order to demolish, and impose upon themselves the hopeless effort of rolling the stone of Sisyphus uphill in order to let it roll back down again.” — Immanuel Kant

*abderitic – believing the world is getting neither worse nor better, while simultaneously believing the world is getting both better and worse.